This is your free article this month.A quality publication is not cheap to produce.Subscribe today and support The American Interest—only $2.99/month!Already a subscriber? Log in to make this banner go away.

U.S. Air Force proposals to mothball America’s premier close air support jet just don’t add up.

Just when we thought the venerable ground attack jet, the A-10 “Warthog”, might be safe for a few more years, reports have surfaced that the U.S. Air Force is resorting to subversion in its longstanding attempt to prematurely cut short the much-beloved tank buster’s service life. While there are good arguments to be made that a different platform could do the A-10’s job better (if not a high-low mixture of platforms, according to at least one Air Force concept), proposals to retire the A-10 prematurely are not justifiable from a force structure or budgetary standpoint.

When it comes down to it, from a public policy perspective, the A-10 is simply a good deal for the U.S. military and the U.S. taxpayer. Instead of retiring the plane, there is evidence the A-10 fleet’s service life could be extended to preserve the U.S. military’s most celebrated superior close air support capability. Yet if the A-10 is phased out, as planned by 2022, a suitable replacement should be ready to fill the gap created by its departure.The A-10 is widely regarded as the premier close air support (CAS) aircraft in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) inventory. CAS is a distinct air-to-ground capability that prioritizes persistent counter-land attributes, which include: long on-station times (“loiter”); the capacity to fly low and slow for direct targeting purposes; and the ability to land and launch from unimproved basing. Presently, there is no comparable CAS platform in the USAF that meet these requirements as well as the A-10.Given the U.S. military’s continued high tempo of counterterrorism and air to ground operations and the lack of a comparable alternative CAS platform to the A-10, it would be militarily unjustifiable to retire the plane absent a suitable replacement. In spite of drawdowns in the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters in recent years, demand for high capability CAS platforms has remained high. As recently as 2014, A-10s flew combat sorties in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan. In the same year, A-10s were deployed to bases in Kuwait in support of operations targeting ISIS in Syria and Iraq; in 2015, A-10s were dispatched on multiple occasions to Eastern Europe as part of U.S. reassurance measures to counter Russian aggression; and in late 2015, additional A-10s were deployed to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey as part of expanded counter-ISIS operations. It is clear that demand signal for the A-10 continues to be strong among theater-level commanders.From a budgetary perspective, any savings in maintenance and personnel costs associated with the immediate retirement of the A-10 might be eaten up by the increased costs of shifting the CAS mission to other USAF systems while maintaining the same operational tempo. According to the USAF’s own testimony, years of high operational tempo are contributing to unprecedented stress on an already aging and historically small fixed wing fleet.Yet retiring the A-10 would not diminish the demand for or utility of the CAS mission set. Instead, the loss of the A-10’s dedicated CAS capability would likely only shift the CAS burden to the USAF’s multirole, fast jet fleet, which is comprised largely of aging, legacy platforms like the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F-16. The current USAF fleet is already under heavy strain from decades of high operational tempo, underinvestment in modernization, and extended delays in the delivery of planned replacement F-35 aircraft to the USAF. Killing the A-10 would just kick the can even further down the road, which will only compound already mounting costs of replacing our aging workhorse fighters.While adept in many ground attack functions, the F-16 and F-15 fleets (and F-35s) are considered imperfectly suited to the CAS mission for which the A-10 was purpose-built. Utilizing F-15s and F-16s for CAS would likely add to the stresses on theses platforms, potentially imposing long term costs in maintenance and procurement without providing the same CAS benefits as the A-10. In addition, the A-10’s estimated cost-per-flight-hour ($17,716) is far lower than the less-capable platforms that would replace it, like the F-16 ($22,514) and the F-15 ($41,921). Barring a sudden decrease in demand for CAS, which appears unlikely given current and projected operational needs, prematurely retiring the A-10 might exacerbate the USAF’s modernization and procurement dilemma.Dispensing with the A-10 fleet would save only an estimated 1 percent of the USAF’s total budget—and shift operational strain onto non-CAS, less suitable, higher cost platforms. Instead, the A-10 force could arguably be upgraded and maintained for decades for relatively little outlay. At the very least, a residual A-10 force ought to be preserved until a replacement CAS-oriented platform is procured. This need not necessarily be a single one-for-one replacement; it’s worth exploring the possibility that a mix of unmanned aircraft, light attack aircraft, and fast jet assets might provide a superior CAS package than the A-10 alone.The good news is that there are promising “off the shelf” aircraft that could perform at least some of the A-10’s CAS and other mission sets equally well or better. In particular, light attack turboprop aircraft—of the kind being purchased for Afghanistan’s fledging air force—offer robust CAS capabilities at relatively low cost and could be fielded quickly. Other offerings, like the Textron AirLand Scorpion, make a lot of sense on paper as part of a high-low mix with turboprops to replace the Warthog. However, these capabilities need to be properly studied, developed, and fielded before the A-10 is retired to ensure both military and budgetary due diligence.So far, the chief rationale for retiring the A-10—making room in the budget for the expensive, high tech (and yet unproven) F-35—doesn’t appear to justify killing off a well-performing system that’s in high demand on today’s battlefield. This policy rationale is particularly suspect given the F-35’s projected stratospheric maintenance costs, the inherent limitations of an airframe built to accommodate three different mission sets (plus stealth), and a dazzlingly expensive per-unit cost for a platform with limited loiter, smaller payload capacity, and suspect survivability at low altitudes—all of which make it a poor, or at least unwieldy, CAS platform. It would be better to pay out the A-10’s 1 percent budget share and preserve its robust capabilities than see those meager savings devoured by the F-35’s gargantuan budget.The F-35, for better or worse, appears to be the future of the U.S. military’s fixed wing, multirole fast-jet fleet, but it will be a far more effective if utilized in addition to the A-10—not as its replacement.

Michael Hikari Cecire is an international security analyst and non-resident fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.